Well, her analogy is more for protected areas where you can hide from lifeless, aggresively public areas and where you can consume (presumably) more authentic content. It doesn't work well in this case for e.g. "cozy web" because places like Snapchat are definitely harvesting your interactions. Whatsapp is literally Facebook. The author of this article is more ranting about the "commercial web" in this case. They don't seem to have the same level of appreciation for some of the corporations that Maggie does.
That’s why I feel like the author is trying to force a square peg into a round hole. WhatsApp is literally Facebook, but all my messages are end-to-end encrypted; I don’t feel like they’re tracking me the same way I do on Instagram. Meanwhile, plenty of people’s blogs have all sorts of nasty tracking shit. People love trying to fit things into dichotomies, but reality is always a lot messier.
> I don’t feel like they’re tracking me the same way I do on Instagram.
They care mostly about the metadata, not so much about the content of your messages.
They know who you write to, when you write to them, when you check the app (which for many people basically means when they wake up and when they go to bed), they have your whole list of contacts.
I mean, they do care about the data. The reason they can afford to not collect it from WhatsApp is that they can correlate the metadata with the data they collect from Facebook and Instagram.
You’re absolutely right that they’re tracking you either way, of course.
When we talk about "metadata", in the context of a messenger like Whatsapp, it refers to the data (metadata is data) around the actual "payload" (which is the e2ee message).
